Michigan State basketball preps for unknowns of long Los Angeles trip at USC, UCLA

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EAST LANSING — It might be Michigan State basketball’s first West Coast swing in the new-look Big Ten. But the concept of a long road trip is not foreign to Tom Izzo’s program.

It’s one reason he never shies away from going to Hawaii or the Bahamas or any other Thanksgiving-week destination. Those long getaways with back-to-back-to-back games, Izzo always has believed, get his team ready for what’s to come in March.

Only this trip, with two high-stakes games in Los Angeles, is in the first days of February, and in the thick of a conference championship hunt, with the first game Saturday afternoon at USC (4:30 p.m., Peacock), a week and three time zones away from the seventh-ranked Spartans’ last road win, last Saturday over Rutgers at Madison Square Garden in New York.

Mar 17, 2023; Columbus, OH, USA; Michigan State Spartans forward Jaxon Kohler (0) battles USC Trojans forward Kobe Johnson (0) in the first half for position in the first half at Nationwide Arena. Mandatory Credit: Rick Osentoski-USA TODAY Sports

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“At the end of the day, you gotta play ball where you gotta play ball. There’s people at the next level that go from one coast to another in less than 24 hours,” junior Jaxon Kohler said after Tuesday’s stopover home win against Minnesota. “It’ll be a good experience for us. But we just have to make sure that we bring it and we don’t let the other things like the time change and atmosphere and everything kind of get to us.

“We just gotta play our game, and we gotta come out and play strong.”

Riding a 13-game win streak and a perfect start to conference play, MSU (18-2, 9-0 Big Ten) faces the Trojans (12-8, 4-5) — one of the league’s four new teams – for the first time since Izzo’s team beat USC, 72-62, in the first round of the 2023 NCAA tournament in Columbus, Ohio. The Spartans hold a 4-3 series lead all-time, including a win over the…

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Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/michigan-state-basketball-preps-unknowns-110609087.html

Author : Detroit Free Press

Publish date : 2025-02-01 11:06:00

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